Need advice in trying to get into PE

So, there are a million stories of people not getting into IB or switching career paths once a few years into a job. You can do another internship during the year, take a job in corporate finance out of college and lateral later on, or just get an MBA after a year or 2 out of school and go into IB then. I personally had a very strange path, so I can maybe give you hope:

1. I went to a tiny school in the Midwest that maybe 3-5 people on this entire site has ever heard of. Between a no name school, grades suffered (medical problems first couple years and was a student athlete that didn't help the grades), and very few if any alumni went into banking/PE/HF the path was looking impossible. Let's just say it wasn't really in the cards for me to make it into a BB IB group or MF PE out of undergrad. I realized I wanted to go into banking after my freshman year of college and by then it was a tad late to switch to a target school.

2. Because of my late start to choosing "high finance", I wasn't networking or laying the groundwork ahead of time to even get MM IB internship offers. My parents owned a tiny blue-collar business and one worked in IT, so finance wasn't really well known growing up. By the time it was my junior year of college I hadn't networked at all and had no connections to a bank so all my applications for internships were thrown in the proverbial trash before they even got on the hiring manager's desk. By the end of senior year, I didn't have any internship to speak of (worked summer jobs in college but like manual labor jobs) so I was getting rejected from back-office jobs at banks let alone FO ones. 

3. I took a job on a small team at a CRE brokerage firm in the middle of nowhere simply because it was somewhat related to investing and I needed a job. I remember I was paid $40k a year and got 0 benefits with that job. I was living the dream. I was still looking for investing roles at that time and after about 8 months there I found a small family office that focused on CRE investing. It was a tiny firm that had a couple local properties, and I was the only analyst on that team. I was sitting pretty, making $65k now and had health insurance so I was thrilled. Still wanted to be on the corporate side but at least I was in an investing role and making a livable wage in the small Midwest city. 

4. I stayed at the family office for multiple years, (3-4 maybe? who knows at this point) and I started getting emails from recruiters about larger firms as I was now the one sourcing new acquisitions, underwriting them, and running the DD process. I lateralled to a larger REPE shop that had (at the time) ~5B in AUM and took on a larger role responsibility wise. I now had a couple people working under me and a fair bit of autonomy. At this point I was making about $150k with the promise of carry (I didn't stay long enough to realize any of it sadly).

5. I stayed there about 2 years as I looked to finally make that jump to PE and invest in operating companies rather than large RE assets. I found a small LMM shop that took me on as an associate (rather large decrease in title but I got what I wanted so who cares). I finally "made it" and stayed there for quite a while. I made a very nice amount of money while working there, but as I settled down and started a family, I needed my time back.

6. So I lateralled to a F500 company to do M&A on a corp dev team and still doing operating company investments, but I get to work at 9am, leave at 4pm, work probably a total of 3-4 hours a day TBH, and my nights and weekends are nearly protected completely. Could I go back to PE if I wanted to? Absolutely. Could I do IB now? Yes, but why would I ever put myself through that at this point. 

TDLR; my career path was non-target/no internship and about as unglamourous as it gets in terms of "prestige", but I made it to PE and corp dev anyways. There are a million ways to get into the industry and each stop along the way just needs to get you incrementally closer. Small town CRE brokerage to F500 Corp Dev is not exactly a linear proposition.